Giant predatory worms invaded France, but scientists just noticed them - The Washington Post
▻https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/05/22/giant-predatory-worms-invaded-france-but-scientists-just-noticed-them/?noredirect=on
Intéressant sur le rôle des simples citoyens dans la découverte de ces espèces. Un exemple de l’importance des sciences participatives.
Sifting through the pictures, it became apparent that French citizens had known something was amiss in their yards for years. They just had no idea what they were looking at.
A collage of the flatworm images collected by citizen scientists. (Jean-Lou Justine CC-BY 4.0.)
The oldest sighting was a home video from 1999, made by a family who kept the VHS tape for so long because the creatures on it were so bizarre. Justine put their mystery to rest: flatworms. In 2013, a group of terrorized kindergartners claimed they saw a mass of writhing snakes in their play field: Again, flatworms. All told, these citizen scientists made 111 observations of large flatworms between 1999 and 2017.
What set this discovery of alien flatworms apart, in Justine’s eyes, was not just the size of the predators or the duration of the hidden invasion, but where it all happened. “It is France! It is supposed to be a developed country. We have a lot of scientists, we have universities everywhere,” he said. And yet the worms escaped identification until now.
They are there to stay. As Justine noted, “We have scientific proof from citizen scientists that they are infesting gardens year after year after year.”
via @liotier
